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First off, before I get started with the heavy stuff, I hope that you and yours have had a wonderful holiday season and I wish you a Happy New Year! OK, now onto less celebratory and more serious material.
There are people who want to cling to civilization because this is the only life they’ve ever known. Then, there are others who realize that this way of life CANNOT be continued, period. Attempting to continue this set of living arrangements WILL cause the extirpation of our species, along with countless other organisms. Even if we attempted to end civilization right now, there is no guarantee that there is a tomorrow for our species. Let’s say an EMP takes out the electrical grid in the USA, which proceeds to end industrial civilization as we know it. Over the following months, billions of people would die from starvation, disease, predatory behavior, and other issues caused by collapse. Climate change would possibly be stymied for a short period of time by the massive amount of aerosols released from burning of wood and plastics caused by millions of people trying to stay warm and cooking any available food, but once these aerosols are washed out of the atmosphere, climate change would be supercharged with the additional carbon dioxide produced along with an absence of aerosols from fossil fuel burning (the aerosol masking effect). Ultimately, we’re in a double bind, which means that most people will probably decide to live in as much comfort as possible until the end. I have little doubt that some people will go against the grain and follow a more ecological path, especially those who understand ecological overshoot. Trying to predict a precise outcome, of course, is a fool’s errand; too many interconnecting and interacting processes are involved.
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Bending reality is as simple as bending people’s perception of reality.
Throughout history, the mythology of civilizations around the world has been full of tales of men and women who mastered a mysterious, esoteric art which enabled them to use language in a way that bends reality to their will. They’ve been called wizards, witches, magicians, sorcerers, warlocks or enchanters, and the utterances they speak have been known as spells, magic, incantations, conjurations or enchantments, but the theme is always more or less the same: a member of a small elite group with the ability to voice special utterances which shape reality according to their will in a way that transcends the mundane mechanics of this world.
People have long held a general intuition that language holds a power far beyond what ordinary mortals use it for, especially since the advent of the written word which was long mysterious to all but the most elite classes in a given society. This intuition has been spot on, though perhaps not exactly in the way that ancient mythologies have envisioned.
When I say “Bending reality is as simple as bending people’s perception of reality,” I’m not making some sort of mystical or otherworldly claim; I’m just making a factual observation about the influence that narrative control has over events big and small which transpire in our world. Many people whose brains lack a healthy empathy center–i.e. sociopaths, psychopaths and other narcissists–already understand this on some level.
Humans are storytelling creatures; everything about our understanding of the world is made up of narratives that are made of language. “My name’s Alice and I was born in Detroit” is a narrative. “The universe is 13.772 billion years old” is a narrative. “If I drink that bottle of bleach I’ll probably die” is a narrative.
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From dismal science to language of beauty – Towards a new story of economics | Degrowth 2014.
Humans are storytelling beings. In fact one could argue that it is impossible to make sense of the world without story. Storytelling is how we piece together facts, beliefs, feelings and history to form something of a coherent whole connecting us to our individual and collective past, present and future. The stories that help make meaning of our lives inform how we shape and re-shape our environment. This re-created world, through its felt presence in structures and systems as well as its cultural expressions, in turn tells us its story.
We live in a time of powerful globalised narratives. We no longer (or rarely) sit and listen to tales that were born of places we know intimately and told by people deeply connected to these places. Ours is a world saturated with information from every corner of the planet, voiced by ‘storytellers’ on television, radio, the internet, mobile phones, newspapers, billboards, books and magazines. It would appear that we now have access to a multitude of perspectives and, with that, more understanding of the different options open to human beings to live fulfilling lives. In reality however, the majority of us have to conform to a narrow set of rules not of our own making: the rules of economics.
The way in which our lives have become dominated by the pursuit of financial gain is full of contradictions. We may not be driven by the ‘love of money’ but we still have to ‘make a living’. The fluctuations in the economy have a profound effect on our everyday lives, but very few of us understand how it works, let alone feel we have the power to influence it. This lack of agency fills most of us with a degree of ‘background anxiety’ that drives many of our decisions, consciously or unconsciously. The economic story is possibly the most powerful story being told at this very moment.
So how is this story being told (and sold) to us? How is it being framed?
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